Highlight Glare: Bloom and Haze
Highlight Glare takes the brightest parts of your photo and bleeds light from them. The Photo Editor has two modes, Bloom and Haze, each with intensity and threshold controls.
Bloom
Bloom adds a soft glow around bright areas. Light sources, reflections, white clothing, sky highlights, anything above the threshold gets a luminous halo. The effect stacks with itself: a very bright area glows more than a moderately bright one.
Set Highlight Glare to Bloom in the Adjustments panel. Threshold (100-250) controls which pixels qualify as "bright enough" to glow. Lower threshold means more of the image glows. Intensity (5-100%) controls how far and how strongly the glow spreads.
- Subtle bloom (intensity 15-25%, threshold 200): only the hottest highlights glow. Adds a slight halation around light sources. Good for portraits with window light.
- Medium bloom (intensity 40-60%, threshold 160): visible glow on skin highlights, bright fabrics, any reflective surface. Dreamy but still readable.
- Heavy bloom (intensity 80-100%, threshold 120): the whole image softens around its bright points. Fog-of-light effect. Works for backlit portraits and golden hour shots.
Haze
Haze lifts the overall brightness and reduces contrast in the highlights. Instead of a localized glow, the image gets an atmospheric wash, like shooting through morning fog or a dirty lens. The brightest areas spread a flat, low-contrast film across the frame.
Haze at low intensity (10-20%) softens an image without making it look filtered. At high intensity (60-80%) it creates a bleached, overexposed look where highlights merge into each other.
Combine with Other Adjustments
- Bloom + Warm temperature: golden glow. The warmth tints the bloom halo, so highlights bleed warm rather than white. Good for sunset and golden hour edits.
- Bloom + Faded curve: the lifted shadows from Faded plus the glowing highlights from Bloom create a flat, vintage softness. Works on skin.
- Haze + B&W mode: atmospheric, low-contrast black and white. The haze kills harsh transitions between tones. Looks like a silver gelatin print with light leak.
- Bloom + High contrast: aggressive. The contrast pushes shadows down while bloom pushes highlights up. The midtones get squeezed. Good for dramatic single-light portraits.
Glare and Grain Together
Bloom and haze both soften the image. Adding grain after the glare effect re-introduces texture and prevents the photo from looking too smooth or synthetic.
- Film grain at 25-40% after Bloom: the grain sits in the glow, giving it a photographic texture like light hitting film emulsion.
- Particles at 15-25% after Haze: dust specks catch in the haze and look like particles floating in atmospheric light.
- Use the Image Analyser to keep grain out of the blown highlights (set Highlights zone to 0-5%) and concentrate it in the midtones and shadows. The glare stays smooth, the rest of the image has texture.
Recipes
- Golden portrait: Bloom 50%, threshold 170, Temperature +25, S-Curve, Film grain 30%
- Foggy morning: Haze 45%, threshold 150, Cool temperature -15, Wash 20%, Mono grain 20%
- Backlit dreamy: Bloom 80%, threshold 130, Faded curve, Warm temperature +15, Particles 20%
- Film halation: Bloom 30%, threshold 190, Film grain 40%, Film preset at low intensity
Open the Photo Editor, pick a photo with visible highlights (window light, sky, reflections), and switch Highlight Glare to Bloom. The glow shows up immediately.
Tools used in this guide
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